The Crisis (23 page)

She picked up a sharp stone and stuffed it into her jeans pocket.

She left not only the road but the Durmani Valley, stumbling cross-country as the sun blazed. She'd lost her bush hat with the car but had a
kerchief as a sweat rag. She tied it over the back of her neck, rolled her shirtsleeves down, oriented by the sun, and marched.

Having no water felt like trudging naked across the desert. She was instantly thirsty, and after two hours began having walking dreams. At first of Ireland, a tumbling stream she'd played in as a child. Then the fountains in Cork, then a glassy lake where birds like none on earth stared at her, repeating nonsense phrases in the Gaelic she'd learned in grade school, with maddening repetition she knew even as she dreamed was tinged with delirium.

Sweat flaked from her skin, drying the moment it left her pores. She stumbled on scree, breaking the fall with palms that burned on the sun-heated ground. Got up, went on.

Then fell again, so heavily she lay full length, panting and moaning as the stones burned her face. She might not make it out. Too used to reaching for water whenever she wanted it. She was on her own now, in a land that tormented, then consumed whatever alien creature ventured out on it. She sat up and searched her pockets. Pens, coins, keys. She slipped a key off and put it in her mouth.

She lay down again, knees huddled to her chest, eyelids drooping like a lizard's. Conserving whatever moisture she had left.

With agonizing slowness the blazing sphere that tormented all life below it declined. It touched the mountains and ignited them like phosphorus. Then slipped into the evening's pocket, and the stars swung up out of the east. When the mountains glowed with backlight, far and intangible as a dream, she woke. “You must keep moving,” she muttered. She forced herself erect and staggered on.

The desert was empty but not lifeless. With the cooling of dusk, creatures emerged from where they sheltered from the merciless radiation. Small leathery things scurried away from her bootscuffs. Geckos. A large spider, rearing crablike as she towered above it. She blinked at it as the light faded. A flash of yellow drew her eye. A thin plastic bag, the omnipresent detritus of Man. She plucked it up and stuffed it into a pocket.

A faint flapping lured her off her easterly course. A nomad tent of blackened skins, fly fluttering in the evening wind. She approached trembling and called out, clutching the rock-weapon in her pocket. No answer. She called again a stone's throw away. When she thrust the flap aside she saw the desiccated bodies.

Of course there was no water, though she tore the tatty rugs and stinking cloths aside, scrabbling down to the bare ground.

She walked and walked, feeling as if chicken wire were pressed against
her toes and heels. Then they went numb as the skin wore away. She stood on a rise and from somewhere reason resurfaced. She looked left, then right, like a Muslim at prayer. Tens of thousands of years back this dry bed must've been yet another eastward-flowing stream. Stumbling on, she sensed a depression. Her boots clattered over rounded rocks.

A gully drew her eye, blacker than the surrounding dim. The blacknesses were low brush. Thornbushes, young tamarinds. Her feet drifted to where they clustered.

She fell to her knees and dug and dug as the light faded, breaking nails, scraping off skin, panting between clenched teeth. About a foot down she fell to her face and put her lips to the ground.

Dusty, powdery, millions-of-years-old dry. She gagged, then sobbed, losing it for a duration filled with agony and terror.

Then she got up again, and went on.

 

SOMETIME past midnight, lurching toward one particular bright star two hand-breadths above the horizon, she heard a waterfall. It faded as she staggered on, then returned. She was away with the fairies, surely, but where there was a waterfall there must be water, so she tottered on.

She went over a lip in the darkness and crashed into rocks and what felt like broken glass at the bottom. She lay dazed, drifting, as images wandered before her open eyes.

The sound came again, closer. Accompanied by a vanishingly brief flash.

Not a waterfall. Something more ominous.

Suddenly it was on her. She pressed herself like a filling into the cavity of the gully, clawing dry earth as the roar of diesels and the ground-shaking grating of steel treads broke loose dry clods and tried to bury her. She forgot thirst, the pain in her feet, even her terror, as the roaring thing reared, then clattered directly overhead while she crouched like a hunted fawn. The hot breath of a dragon blew down on her. Then it was past, gone. After hugging the ground against its return she wiped dirt from her face and raised her eyes over the edge of the depression.

Outlined by flames from their backs, the black monsters were rolling into a rough line. She stared unblinking as an insect must, neither comprehending nor trying to, only registering sensation.

The monsters were aligning themselves, three, four, six, when a lance of white fire burst from her right. It beamed with perfect impossible straightness across the black ground, sucking up dust and sand. The sound was like the tearing of the bedsheets of the gods. The flame impacted one of the monsters with a clang that shivered the night. By far the loudest sound
she'd ever heard, and she clapped palms over agonized ears as more fireballs whipped across the desert, each lighting it like a fiery chunk of the sun launched in a perfect horizontal at supersonic speed. With each fireball a tremendous crack tolled over sand and rock, followed by a clang like a cathedral bell dropped from its tower onto granite pavement. Each clang made her teeth vibrate and sent a strange tingle through her legs. Which were, she barely noticed, suddenly and warmly wet.

A movement behind her, accompanied by a staccato clatter and whining growl even more threatening than that of the first monsters.

Surrounded by fire and machines, she dropped to her face like a desert eremite in the awesome presence of God. Her body felt enormous and not really hers, but she tried to hide it anyway, feeling distantly responsible, writhing wormlike into the soil. The clanging and brightness went on, perhaps for only seconds yet endless. Then at last, drew away.

When she lifted her head again intense fires blowtorched a mile away, white-hot, speckled by explosive pops and bangs.

She crouched, shaking, peering into the night. Then picked out her star once more, scrambled up from the ditch, and set out again.

 

SHE lay unseeing, face to the sky, until a vaporous iridescence gradually dawned. Then rose, knowing only she must move on or die. Staggering over stones amid which gleamed hundreds of small, bright metal cylinders, slightly sooted at their open mouths.

A mile on she stumbled over two men lying full length atop a rise. They were camouflaged so perfectly she hadn't seen them a pace away. They stared up, startled. One reached for a weapon, then stayed his hand. “Who's this?” he murmured.

The other, face scarred with radiating lines, said, “Hell, Sumo. Just one of them desert mirages. But I bet she'd say yes if you offered her a drink of water.”

 

THE ramps of the landing craft of the second prong of the offensive had been supposed to drop on Red Beach, two miles east of the marine terminal, precisely one minute after sunrise, when the rising sun, glaring over the heads of the men crouched in the wells, would dazzle any defenders. But they didn't fall until fifteen minutes later, due to coral heads in the shallow water. An LCM hit one so hard it bent a shaft. The wave leader ordered them to slow, and to post bow lookouts to steer between them on the way in.

This landing had the look of old newsreels: sluglike amtracs waddling
out of the surf, then tipping upward to roll over the dunes; the slanted bows of landing craft, creaming wakes as they circled offshore. One by one they beached as helicopters passed overhead. Loudspeakers explained in recorded Asahaaran (unfortunately, the dialect of the former ruling clan) that the troops were there to help and feed the population.

In the midst of the noise LCM-25's ramp slammed down. The leader of the first fire team off—“Team,” in Marine parlance—was a twenty-three-year-old lance corporal from Michigan.

Crunching on a homebrew mix of MRE powdered coffee, Copenhagen, and ephedrine-laced energy supplement, Caxi Spayer jumped down, relieved to find the water only a couple feet deep. “Follow me,” he bellowed at the three others in his fire team, and waddled for the shore, the men so burdened with ruck and rations, armor vest, ceramic plate overvest, grenades, radio, rifle, and ammunition that they looked inhuman, inflated bulks capped by Kevlar.

Facing him was a white beach backed with villas. The tumbled granite of a breakwater. The square tower and the minaret, lined up, meant they were in position. In the distance, the blue cranes of the container port, their objective for the day.

Turning to check Ready, Fire, and Assist were still with him, he led them toward a two-story red house that dominated the beach. A helicopter scissored overhead, its gunner scanning the beach. He and Spayer exchanged thumbs-ups. The fire team on Spayer's flank was making for the same house, but he was ahead. He picked up the pace until his boots sank deep into soft sand above the high-tide mark. He lost his balance, toppled and fell. Trying to keep his rifle clear, he turned his head to spit sand and the gritty residue of powdered coffee.

He looked up to see a man so black he was like a hole in the light, wearing a pink straw hat, rubber flip-flops, and a lime green shirt, in his face with a camera. Behind him another camera strobed. A ripple of flashes alone the dune line above them made Caxi wince. He lurched to his feet facing a cameraman in blue flak jacket with a Fox logo. “Smile, Lance Corporal.” A lieutenant slapped his back. “Gonna be on TV, my man.”

The line of marines in battle dress went prone as they skylined the tops of the dunes. Then looked confused as they were swarmed by hundreds of kids, long-legged adolescent boys, grave older men in headwraps. Spayer waddle-charged slowly up his sandhill, heart knocking from ephedrine, caffeine, and his first beach assault.

Dozens of people milled at the red house. Kids pelted after a soccer ball. Women in saris waved from a balcony. A heavyset Indian in a tieless suit hurried over, hugging bottles of orange drink. “American? American!
We prayed for you to come! Now we shall have peace, we are safe!” He shouted to the kids, who mustered into a ragged line at ragged attention. Veiled women advanced, dark eyes eloquent. They cupped filigree balls from which a blue smoke scented with lemon and sweet turpentine eddied. They circled the astonished fire team, waving fragrant haze toward them with hennaed palms as the children chanted, “Welcome to Ashaara! We are your friends!”

“We drink this orange shit, Team Leader?” said the assistant automatic weapons gunner.

“Take it and smile, but dump it when we're out of sight. Stay tactical, jarheads. Eyes on the swivel, watch those rooftops.”

Spayer took his team downhill. The map showed broken dunes between them and the crane cabs that loomed ahead. The helicopter went over again, banking left.

“Raven Eight, Raven. Over.”

He took a knee as he answered, reporting Raven Eight three hundred meters inland with no contact. They were exiting the dune line and in sight of the objective. As he spoke he caught the upperworks of one of the PCs gliding over the dunes, flying both the Stars and Stripes and the white, green, and black Ashaaran ensign. It was headed in to take a support station off the seawall, placing any hostiles between hammer and anvil.

He rose and went on. They came to paths winding amid brush. The wind from the sea languished and a buzzing cloud rose. The marines slapped and cursed as the flies bit and returned in hooking reattacks, concentrating on lips and eyes. The dunes grew lower, the bushes higher as the team pushed inland. The SAW gunner had his weapon tucked under an arm, ready if they took fire. He and the rifleman were discussing in low serious voices whether Indian women could be considered slut possibilities. The sand paths were littered with broken glass, turds, crispy-looking dried condoms.

Spayer was beginning to think this might be a walk-in. But then thought
ambush
and angrily gestured Fire and Assist into silence and vectored them farther to the right. This slid the two elements of the fire team forward parallel to each other but staggered by ten yards and separated by thirty. Closer than he liked, but he had to be able to signal to them above the brush. There were people all around, though he couldn't see them; their shouts and gay cries rang clear. He hawked and spat flies that bit as they died. Poor as hell, ragged, close to starving—at least the blacks, though the Indians looked pretty well off. They all sounded happy to see Americans, though.

He came around a bend in the trail and pivoted at a stir to the left. Then
lowered his rifle. Just a piled-up nest of trash, crumpled boxes, wadded-up grass, greasy rags.

He turned away, but something caught at his arm. He whipped back, ready to take the rifleman's head off, only to see a small shaven head at the level of his belt. Gleaming black eyes above a big grin minus several teeth. The flies crawling around those eyes didn't seem to disturb their owner.
“B'jour,”
the boy said.

Spayer's gaze traced a trail of cardboard to realize the boy had emerged from the trash pile, apparently a nest. “Hey, guy.”

“Hey.” The grin grew. “Hey guy.
V' nom?
”

“What you trying to say, kid? Hey—where—”

“Nabil,” the boy said, patting Spayer's side. All he wore was a torn, dirt-blackened T-shirt that read “Bofalo Bills.” His legs were sticks. One foot dragged in the sand. His cheekbones were pushing through his skin. He'd been beaten recently; his face was bruised and cut to a degree that would've had an American kid in the emergency room for stitches. Spayer smelled strong by now, after the LCM, the heat, and the tension, but the boy's stink cut through his own, a possum-in-the-garbage stench that sent an American nose into overload. Holding his breath, he felt in his pocket for the Planters Peanut Bar he'd stuck there before loading. Held it out, expecting it to be snatched.